You know George Soros.
He’s the investor’s investor—the man who still holds the record for
making more money in a single day’s trading than anyone. He pocketed
$1 billion betting against the British pound on “Black Wednesday” in
1992, when sterling lost 20 percent of its value in less than 24 hours
and crashed out of the European exchange-rate mechanism. No wonder Brits
call him, with a mix of awe and annoyance, “the man who broke the Bank
of England.”

Soros
doesn’t make small bets on anything. Beyond the markets, he has plowed
billions of dollars of his own money into promoting political freedom in Eastern Europe and other causes. He bet against the Bush White House, becoming a hate magnet for the right that persists to this
day. So, as Soros and the world’s movers once again converge on Davos,
Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum this week, what is one of the
world’s highest-stakes economic gamblers betting on now?

He’s
not. For the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he
is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right,
given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He
won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down
to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making
long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate
bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.